This year’s Greenbelt programme contained a piece by Maggi Dawn, who sadly wasn’t able to be at the festival. Reading the programme on the tube back from a post-festival get-together, I really connected with Maggi commenting:

Whether Glastonbury or Global Gathering, at their heart, all festivals are actually less about gazing at bands from the back of a field, and far more about the day-to-day encounters we have around the site. We have a fundamental need for these real-life meetings, because without them, we cannot create or sustain community. Yet, strangely, that’s one of the paradoxes of this idea of festival: we immerse ourselves in order to be able to leave it. Showing up is what makes the festival work, but Greenbelt is also all about not being at Greenbelt, about taking the infection away and breeding it in the day to day communities that sustain us.

I love the second-half of the paragraph, but it was the first that really struck me. I had one of those years where I felt like I didn’t really see the festival in the programme sense. I turned up for a few minutes at several gigs, and took a lot of photos (all of which sit on my laptop awaiting editing, I’ll post again when something’s on flickr) but I wasn’t able to really get a sense of what the festival was like this year. And that’s okay.

David Dark and I had a brief exchange about the “deep magic” (I called it magic, he added the deep) that keeps so many of us working at the festival. We run ourselves ragged, get frustrated, and channel it all into conversations about how we’ll fix it for next year. Always next year. (almost) Always hopeful. It’s quite a thing.

The festival may or may not be in perpetual beta, but the feature set is somehow compelling.

Last year among many other activities we managed to:

• sell a house
• travel round the world
• move from the USA (Grand Rapids, MI) to the UK (London)

As a follow-up this year, we’re in the process of:

• moving out of our rented flat
• heading to the US for a couple of weeks
• buying a house
• having a baby

Today was the big day when the removal firm came and moved us out of our rented flat. All our belongings are going into storage until such a time as we can move into the house we’re buying. So for the next couple of weeks while in the US, and for at least a week after that we’re going to be experiencing that safe, middle class form of homelessness known as “crashing with friends.” And very grateful we are too.